Since 2009, Clarivate Analytics has been profiling the world’s leading universities and research institutions using an exclusive set of key performance indicators for our Institutional Profiles initiative.

Institutional profiles facilitate a multidimensional and unbiased comparison of all aspects of a university’s performance regardless of the university’s mission, size, geographical location or subject mix. Combining gold-standard bibliometric information with unique data on reputation, demographics of staff, students and funding creates a 360 degree view of all aspects of an institution’s performance.

Profiles are utilized by universities, funding agencies, governments and rankings agencies as a valuable tool to identify weaknesses and strengths, find peer institutions, compare to global or regional benchmarks and to promote achievements to their stakeholders.

The Institutional Profiles project collects, validates and analyses data from the following three unique sources and across six broad academic disciplines.

Demographical data collected directly from universities:

Working directly with the administrative offices of approximately 800 of the world’s leading universities, Clarivate Analytics collects relevant and internationally comparable statistical data on staff, students and degrees awarded, gender, international diversity and funding. Utilizing a common set of criteria and definitions, it is the first global set of statistical data on higher education and research.

Where appropriate, we utilize authoritative third-party data sources and all the data is validated by the institution and by Clarivate Analytics.

Clarivate Analytics annual Academic Reputation Survey:

Clarivate Analytics polls academics around the world asking their feedback on what they consider to be the strongest universities and research institutions in their discipline. The survey is carefully designed to generate robust and meaningful results.

Survey participation is by invitation only to prevent manipulation of the results and participants are carefully selected by geographical location and discipline for statistically relevant sampling. Additionally, the survey is offered in nine languages to overcome language bias. View the details of the survey methodology here.

In previous surveys, around 90 percent of the 60,000+ survey participants were academic faculty or researchers from approximately 150 countries. On average, they have more than 17 years experience working in academia. See the previous year's Academic Reputation Survey summary here.

Publication and citation data from InCites™ :

InCites is based on publication data from the carefully selected 12,000+ scholarly journals indexed in the Web of ScienceTM Core Collection and provides valuable benchmarking and normalization statistics to better interpret publication and citation counts.

We work with every institution to understand their affiliated institutions, history of name changes and mergers to accurately capture all the papers that are affiliated to the institution.

Citation counts are benchmarked against each of the 250 research areas in the Web of Science to create indicators that reflect performance relative to the average of the research area and year. These are rolled up to create normalized indicators that reflect performance regardless of the subject mix of the university.

The comprehensive analysis of millions of papers and tens of millions of citations across hundreds of disciplines and multiple years truly is a Big Data initiative and takes serious commitment of human capital and computing power.

To inquire about the inclusion of your university in the Institutional Profiles project please contact: